To tell the truth, graphical fidelity isn't always as important to me (kind of funny for a D2X-XL fan) but I'm certain that there are many other huge benefits to using UE4 besides visual. I know that I for one will greatly enjoy having a spherical hitbox instead of a cylindrical one so that I can stop getting stuck on maps and other people. As far as I know, UE4 also has much better control support. I know that Descent: Underground (UE4) has no problems reading my joystick inputs so there's no need for an xinput wrapper. The handling of hat switches though is really REALLY bad...

Anyway, as always, every time I see something new I just get more excited!

Not to impose, but is it particularly taxing on the hardware to have the water reflection and refraction shader adjust the texel offset for reflection/refraction based on the distance from water to the reflected/refracted object (by height or l2 norm, though height is loads easier and looks about the same)? In other words, objects near the water surface barely shift, while farther objects shift as normal. I know it's a bit tricky, having implemented it myself, but it's nice to not have that weird cut-off effect at the water's edge.

That's a great idea. In both UDK and UE4, the cheap way to do this is to take the difference between the Pixel Depth (distance from camera to the point on the water being rendered) and the Scene Depth (dist from cam to whatever is first drawn behind the water) and divide by some constant to turn this into a percentage (which should be clamped between 0 - 1). There are some other nodes that do this in a more accurate way, but with a higher instruction count (DepthFadeOffset etc). Its not particularly taxing on the hardware - in fact, that type of control is already in this particular shader to impact color and opacity. Wiring that result to impact the refraction too comes basically for free. I'll play with it and see what happens.